For the best experience, we encourage you to use one of the recommended third-party launchers listed below, as they are much easier to use thanks to their built-in support for downloading and managing mods.

However, we also understand that some users may be unwilling or unable to install other launchers, especially if their Minecraft account is managed by a parental guardian. If this is the case, you can always use the official Minecraft launcher to install your mods, which comes with the same level of support from our team.

The Modrinth Launcher has the most streamlined user interface and is arguably the easiest to use option for players who are new to modding. It also allows you to follow the projects and developers you are most interested in, and provides helpful functionality for automatically updating your mods. However, it only supports automatically downloading content from Modrinth, and requires manual installation for mods that are sourced from CurseForge.

Furthermore, while it is the only recommended launcher on this list that allows mod authors to get paid for their work, this comes at the consequence of it having built-in ads enabled by default, which you may find objectionable.

Prism Launcher is known to have great compatibility with our mods, and is generally regarded as being a stable, lightweight, and high-quality option for players. The launcher also supports the ability to automatically download and install both mods and mod packs from either CurseForge or Modrinth, meaning that it will be easy to install nearly anything you come across.

Some users have found that Prism Launcher's interface can be a little challenging to use the first time, so you might want to read the Getting Started guide.

This is not an exhaustive list, but represents the launchers we most frequently see issues with. If you are using a launcher mentioned here, then we strongly encourage you to switch to using one of the recommended launchers mentioned above.

The CurseForge Launcher has had a long, troubled history in regards to corporate ownership and software stability. Furthermore, there are a number of issues that remain unresolved, which we believe make it a poor choice when compared to our other recommended picks.

1. The built-in mod management is known to have major weaknesses, which can waste time and result in confusing error messages.
2. The launcher is extremely slow compared to other available options, and uses significant computer resources. Furthermore, it only acts as a shim on top of the official Minecraft launcher, which means that you are technically running two launchers, increasing the resource consumption even further.
3. It contains invasive, unsolicited pop-up advertising that is displayed even when the launcher is closed.
4. The CurseForge launcher injects code into Minecraft which can cause graphical corruption and sudden crashes when used with Sodium. (issue)

For reasons we don't understand, the Lunar Client appears to modify the behavior of Fabric Loader in a way that causes some mods to crash at startup with errors about missing mods. The most frequent example of this problem occurs when installing the Distant Horizons mod, where it complains at startup about Indium being absent, even though the user has installed a recent enough version of Sodium that should not require the other mod.

Additionally, there are reports of performance issues and graphical glitches that only occur when using Lunar Client. For this reason, we advise that users looking for the best experience with Sodium and other mods instead prefer to use one of our recommended picks above. The Minecraft community maintains a list of alternative, free mods for functionality provided by Lunar Client.

Feather Client frequently breaks when mod authors update their mods, which can cause a working installation to become irreparably broken (due to forced automatic updates) until their team fixes the problem.

Additionally, there are many reports that using Sodium with the Feather Client will cause the game to crash at startup with the message "WGL: Failed to create OpenGL context." Furthermore, it is a frequent occurrence that the launcher will automatically update Sodium as soon as we publish an update, which often breaks their launcher and prevents the game from starting correctly.

Much like Lunar Client, we strongly recommend players use one of the launchers from our recommended picks above. The Minecraft community maintains a list of alternative, free mods for functionality provided by the Feather Client.

This includes any launcher that allows for running Minecraft: Java Edition on Android or iOS devices, the most common of which is PojavLauncher. These launchers will very likely not work correctly and they suffer from unavoidable issues that prevent Sodium from working optimally. If you encounter issues with mods, you should report them to the maintainers of the mobile launcher you are using, and not to mod developers directly.

We do not provide support for any launcher that enables software piracy, which is referred to as a "cracked" launcher. These launchers are often full of issues, and make modifications to the game that interfere with the proper functioning of other mods. We do not provide support for cracked launchers, and asking for help regarding such a launcher will result in a permanent ban from our community.